Every Child is Special

Most inclusion training hands you a philosophy and leaves the teaching to you. This week does the opposite: five specific teaching strategies, one a day, each one taken apart, practised on real curriculum material, and rebuilt as something you can run on Monday. They are the five that a review of the international evidence found to matter most for pupils with special educational needs — and they turn out to be the five that make a lesson work for everyone else in the room too.

• Monday you answer the week’s real question — whether pupils with SEND need different teaching or better teaching — and then break one concept down until it can be taught in small, checkable steps.
• Tuesday you make thinking visible: graphic organisers for the concepts students keep mangling, and the prompts that get a class planning and checking its own work.
• Wednesday you build a scaffold — and, more importantly, write the plan for taking it away again.
• Thursday you replace fixed ability groups with temporary ones that form for a stated purpose and disband when it is met.
• Friday you add the technology strand, then assemble the whole week into a single repertoire card and score yourself against where you started on Monday.

You go home with one worked example under each of the five strategies, a fade plan for a scaffold you actually use, a two-week grouping plan for one unit, and an honest split of what you can change alone, what needs one colleague, and what you will have to ask your school for. Nothing in it requires a budget, a new platform, or permission to start.

Ask a teacher what a pupil with special educational needs requires and the answer usually points somewhere else in the building — a specialist, an assistant, an assessment, a programme the school would have to buy. It is a reasonable answer. It is also the reason a lot of good teaching never reaches the students who need it most, because everyone is waiting for the expert.

The evidence points somewhere much less exotic. The Education Endowment Foundation’s guidance report Special Educational Needs in Mainstream Schools was built on a review of the best available international evidence, carried out by a team at the Centre for Educational Development, Appraisal and Research at the University of Warwick. Its finding about classroom teaching is blunt: high quality teaching for pupils with SEND is based on strategies that are already in the repertoire of most mainstream teachers, or can be added to it without much difficulty. Or, as one of the practitioners quoted in the report puts it: good teaching for children with SEND is good teaching for all.

The report names five such strategies — explicit instruction, cognitive and metacognitive strategies, scaffolding, flexible grouping, and using technology — and the EEF publishes them, free, as a practitioner tool teachers can hold in one hand. Five strategies, five days. Each day of this course takes one of them, works it until it is a specific thing you do rather than a word you agree with, and ends with something written down.

The week is not a tour of good ideas, because the strategies have failure modes and most training skips them. A scaffold that never comes off produces a student who cannot work without an adult beside them; the report is explicit that a scaffold is temporary support removed when it is no longer required, which means the removal has to be planned, not hoped for. A scaffold handed only to certain children marks them out, so the EEF’s own reflection questions ask whether you provide scaffolds at whole-class level and let students opt in. And grouping — the strategy schools think they already do — is where the gap between the label and the evidence is widest. Wider evidence from the EEF’s Teaching and Learning Toolkit shows that streaming and setting have, on average, a negative impact on low-attaining pupils, and the observational research cited in the report found that pupils with the highest level of need often spend a substantial share of their time away from the mainstream class and the class teacher, grouped with other pupils identified as low-attaining. Flexible grouping is the alternative, and it is a precise idea: groups allocated temporarily on current mastery of specific content, formed for an explicit purpose and disbanded when that purpose is met. Thursday is spent making that logistically real — what evidence puts a student in today’s group, how you say so without stigma, and what ends it.

The evidence report this week is built on draws a line of its own, and the course keeps to it: high quality teaching for every pupil is one recommendation, and carefully selected targeted intervention is a different one. This week is the first of those. That is also why nothing here asks a teacher to identify what a pupil “has” — there are no condition checklists and no labels. Structured teaching for autistic pupils and pupils with ADHD is the subject of Inclusive Classrooms: Educating Students with ASD and ADHD, and the digital side is covered in depth in Digital Tools for Students with Special Needs; Friday’s technology session stays where the evidence report puts it, as one strand inside ordinary teaching rather than a tour of tools.

What makes the week transferable is that the material is supplied. You are not asked to bring case files, student records, or anything about a real child. The course brings its own curriculum extracts — short passages, worked examples and the misconceptions that come with them, across subjects and age ranges — and every practical session runs on those. If you would rather work on a lesson you are about to teach, you can. Nothing in the week depends on it.

By Friday the five strategies are not five things you have heard of. They are five things you have done once, on paper you are taking home, with your own note under each about where it will be hard in your classroom.